• The violent and forceful concentration of the world's resources by an imperialistic region for its benefit (especially its ruling class).

• A relation of explicit and direct political, social, & cultural domination from an external force.

• Colonial strategies include war & forceful occupation supported by cultural and linguistic domination (Major lesson for colonizers was that it's less expensive to get the colonized to police themselves than to continually enact force upon them).

The modern world is shaped by Eurocentric/Western colonialism, which came to an end in its explicit and direct form through the mid-twentieth century.

• Non-violent subordination of racial, ethnic, and national groups by a dominant centre of power.

• An indirect relation of dependency that requires the internal adoption of the dominant centres' language(s), epistemologies, institutions, beliefs, economic systems, etc.

• Impedes the cultural production of the dominated and produces social and cultural dependency and control through various strategies, including but not limited to:

• • • Cultural genocide to reduce, marginalize, and undercut the prevalence and power of Indigenous cultures, languages, knowledges, and ways of knowing;

    • Deprivation of legitimacy and recognition in the global order dominated by:

      • European Enlightenment standards of "rationality" and "the scientific method" (epistemological coloniality);

      • Notions of "development" and "progress" towards a (Western-defined) "universal culture" (democracy, free market capitalism, liberalism, modern education...);

    • Europeanization/Westernization of elites via education to subordinate non-European cultures/knowledges within their cultural and geographic homelands;

    • Construction of race, racialized social identities, and ideas of biological inferiority and superiority (racial coloniality);

    • Pressured to adopt the economic and political systems and governance structures of the dominant colonial centre (political coloniality)...

• Individuals/groups from the dominant centre of power respond to the dominated's systemic dependency on the Centre with resources that provide greater access to the centre's resources, including access to Western culture, languages, ideologies, epistemologies, etc.

• Focus on intentionality rather than impact.

• Perpetuate dependency, power differentials, and rhetorics of progress towards development and modernization marked by assimilation into the culture of the dominant centre of power.

• Perpetuate a narrative in which racialized individuals are in need of help, lack agency, & cannot speak for themselves nor save themselves, AND that White Europeans are superior and, thus, capable saviours/helpers.

• Simplify & reduce challenges faced by racialized communities, which are presented as eminently solvable by White/Western institutions, structures, and systems, which, ironically, are complicit in subordination and oppression... (e.g., Broekhoff, 2012; Broekhoff, 2014)

• "White / Western actors, or those perpetuating racial hierarchies, have a persistent feeling that not only ‘can’ they do something, but they ‘need’ to do something about Global South poverty." (Khan, Dickson, & Sondarjee, 2023)

• "...Teju Cole coined the term ‘White Savior Industrial Complex’, to point at a more extensive web of intricate North / South relations rather than a few bad apples in the development ecosystem. Mentioning American-backed coups, American militarization, and Western interests in Africa, he qualifies the White Savior Industrial Complex as ‘a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage’ (Cole 2012)." (Khan, Dickson, & Sondarjee, 2023) 

  • Question: can HE internationalization initiatives be considered part of the White Savior Industrial Complex?

Competing & varied conceptions:

• The "end of History" (i.e., struggle) and the culmination of development and modernization with worldwide achievement of the "universal" culture (democracy, free market capitalism, liberalism, modern education...) (Fukuyama, 2015).

  • A return to the Biblical Tower/the City (of Babel/Babylon) before humanity was cursed with different languages and other "issues" of difference).

• A cosmopolitan ideal of mutual exchange and respect that obfuscates power dynamics and economic and political competition;

• A technologically-enhanced continuation of coloniality (relations of dependency that perpetuate global subordination to dominant power centres)...

These concepts are used to characterize internationalization initiatives in Western higher education.

• Evident in study abroad, academic exchange, research scholarships (Fulbright, Rhodes), international branch campuses, sister/affiliate programs, English language learning programs, etc....

• U.S. foreign policy drives HE internationalization (see Smith-Mundt Act and the Fulbright-Hays Act as well as public statements by Secretaries of States like Antony Blinken, who described English as "the most important export from the United States to other countries" in a talk about Uzbekistan in 2023, and Colin Powell, who asserted in 2001: "I can think of no more valuable asset to our country than the friendship of future world leaders who have been educated [in the U.S.]" (Nye, 2005, pp. 12-13)

• Kurihara (2013) offers an example of this scenario playing out in Japan with decades of U.S. effort to influence Japanese culture. She explains that when the U.S. occupied Japan after WWII, it used American-style education and English language programs in an effort to “completely change Japanese minds, with their pre-war hatred morphing into a very close brotherhood with the U.S.A.” (p. 93). With U.S. training via academic exchange and Fulbright scholarships, many Japanese leaders and culture makers have espoused American language, culture, knowledge, and institutions as standards for Japanese life (p. 93).